So get this. I’m going to bed at night every night while my roommate / “significant other” stays up tapping away on a keyboard. Fooling around online, probably. I just assume, I mean I don’t know and frankly I don’t care either. I probably did once, but I’m not that girl anymore. That part of our relationship is chromed over now. As long as it doesn’t cross over into real life and the rent checks don’t bounce I’m totally willing to look at a little platonic dalliance as just one of those retarded things the missing leg on the Y chromosome causes.
Still, there are times when you should trust your instincts, because they end up being right. Low and behold, about a month later we get a request from a friend to crash on our couch. “I’ve got a meeting for my job” she says. “I’ve got to get up early, I won’t be in your place long at ALL.” I get asked my opinion. “Who?” I respond. And not who as in I’m jealous, but who as in “are my things going to go missing?”
Growing up I never assumed people stole things. I mean, I had friends who stole. I had a friend so desperate for me to steal that she put something in my pocket hoping I’d get caught. I knew people who stole from me. But somehow it just never possibly seemed like anything I would ever do, and still wouldn’t. It’s just something other people did. People I never thought were capable are the same people who will try and convince me to this day to do sketchy things with them when they’ve had too much to drink, or think I have. Even now there are grown people I run into who, in their hear of hearts, have no trouble rifling through my desk drawers to find blackmail (which they won’t have because there’s nothing to find.) And yet someone thinks the loose leaf Earl Grey is pot and I get asked at the cooler if I want to go out for a joint in front of my manager. What people do who spend their lives sitting on couches is their own business. I just don’t feel like I have the time, personally. Isn’t that why we’re blessed with the gift of anxiety? So that we will become thin and rich quickly? Just saying…
So at this point, where we have this sort of request appearing on the radar, I look at anyone my roommate “meets on the internet” with suspicion. He grew up in a nice neighborhood. He’s never had to deal with sending anybody home. He also doesn’t know what people who aren’t rich think of people who are. How easy it is for some people to punish everyone based on a presumed wrong probably done completely accidentally by one or two people who aren’t even in the picture anymore. I’m not one to be that way, but I’ve seen what happens to your friends when you go from begging for enough gas money to get a 97 cent burrito for dinner on the way home, to the way they look at you when you’ve started wearing power suits and open a laptop rather than a beer the minute you get home. It’s an outright disgust for some. They don’t see the sacrifices that have to be made in order for you to wear what you do and have dinner and go to parties. They don’t see that you don’t even really want to go to those parties. It’s just business. They don’t even recognize how hard it is to get a break. So when someone says “can I please crash on your couch, it’s for work,” what’s a kid like me who’s called the cops holding the door shut while trying to study algebra (god f@$king algebra) really going to say?
So there you go, I say yes. I think I’m fair. And she stays. A month later though, she’s asking him for the couch again. “Sorry, another work thing– really appreciate it.” And we put her up. Not so pleasant though. There is some casual conversation in which I have my salary information bullied out of me. The shock at it, followed by the recoup, lest I think she thinks I make a lot of money. It’s not quite six figures, but it’s over the line that people draw where they decide you’ve either “made it” or not.
Oddly enough (please not the sarcasm) by the time she leaves we’re about to kill each other. That’s when it’s all too clear to me what she’s up to. On the last day of her stay she slips up. “Everybody’s got to decide what they’re going to do. I’ve decided I’m going to enjoy spending a few days each month in town.” Her eyes go wide. She looks at me like she’s just swallowed a canary. She back-peddles. There was no business meeting this stay. I’ve got her comfortable enough with me that she slips up a moment and begins bragging to me about how she’s got a place in the city – my place, and, for the time anyway, my boyfriend. Is she screwing him? Was it just some degradation on her part to try and secure the vacation spot, sans rent? Or was it just him fooling around online?
Some people might freak out at that point. But this life has taught me well, and while I don’t believe in fate, I remember walking around a corner on a busy afternoon one night, and low and behold here’s this girl, talking about who else? Me. “Yeah, I don’t know what she’s going to do about it…”
Not much. It’s my apartment. I pay rent, therefore I can lock the door, and keep the guest key in my pocket.
I’d feel worse than the usual guilt in saying that, but you know, I’ve been in the welfare line. I was coming home from an event the other night and some guy in the street makes the comment “you rich, you spend your money.” Normally I avoid people, but I just stopped and looked at him. He faltered. I gave him the look, and god help him, he squirmed.
I find most of the people who whine the loudest have not really stood up to being poor. Rich people don’t want dignity as strongly as poor people. That’s the real truth. You can tell a poor kid in a nice suit in a heartbeat. People who stand on corners heckling other people have already lived the high life, probably when they were too young to appreciate it, while the quiet kids who grew up on the dole tend to keep their mouths shut and their noses to their screens.
There’s no net beneath them if they screw up. It’s taken me ten years to get over the anxiety of that fact. Now I’m at the same place everyone else I knew was at at this age. Not really burned out as much as disillusioned. And not really disillusioned as much as ready for a change.
I’m just not stupid enough to self-destruct like so many other people I’ve known. They were all brilliant and most of them are either dead, or dead on the inside, which is much worse in my opinion.
I don’t know what I’ll end up frankly. Maybe an old spinster tending roses in the back of an old victorian house in another country.
The ex-pat old American woman. Makes a mean casserole for the Women’s Pilot Club and the local veteran’s association luncheons.
I don’t know, that doesn’t scare me. I’ve proved myself to myself. Now it’s just a matter of doing what I set out to do on a personal level, and all in all that’s an instant parachute no matter how fast the world around me seems to be going down the drain.
Maybe I’ll go backpacking on my own. I could do it. Finally. I really could.
